Their servers are runinng 99.5% open source software. They are mostly Linux users in-house, so they use Firefox as the only real option.

Firefox usage numbers for Interseek:

June 2005Â – 5.1%

June 2007 – 15.2%

June 2008 – 26.9%

Third one is always Opera (not Safari). In June 2008, Opera has 1.2% usage base.

We have Firefox users

We have a lot of Firefox users, and we must offer them a full service experience. We have to give them goodies like toolbars and Firefox search plugins. Publishing these features is good for us but also helps to expand the general Firefox user base.

Our story

in the first half of 2007 we launched Firefox toolbar and search plugin for Najdi.si and Pogodak (.hr, .ba., rs.) search engines.

What is so cool about Firefox extensions?

It’s mostly cool because XUL is cool. If you know how to make a dynmaic client side web application then you will probably know how to do XUL application. If you know how to program using XML, JavaScript and DOM you know XUL. XUL is supported by the Gecko engine.

Only XUL?

XPCOM components written in C++. Integration of other libraries into Mozilla.

Why would be ever need this? Things we can’t do with Javascript, we can do with an XPCOM component (e.g., usage of tcp socekts, etc.) and then use new functions from Javascript.

XUL extension

If you are planning an extension like toolbar or an ultra cool addon for uploading pictures to your new social network web site..

Building UI applications based on XUL. Two popular applications/examples are Songbird and Komodo.

Is your plugin working in Firefox 3?

Secure updates of your application with files hosted on secure http servers or signed xpi files. If you don’t have https server, it’s also possible to sign them with help of McCoy to create keys and fingerprints.

Zbigniew Braniecki – the power of communities; how to create communities, what does it mean to have a community and what does it mean to participate to communities.

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Why people do things

The do it because they want a reward in some way. There are different types of rewards:

external motivations (good grade, money, airline miles)

hobby

Driven by intristic motivation, practice for interst and enjoyment. Gives you skills, knowledge, experience. But the goal is a personal fulfillment.

Volutneering – highest level onÂ Maslow’sÂ hiarachy of motivation.Â

Mozilla communites are organic. They are organic and part of Mozilla project from the day 0. They contribute to each and every element of the system. Create new elements and serve as whistle-blowers. Contribute their unique skills and knowledge and are united by the goals of manifesto.

Firefox Flicks
The other example is Firefox Flicks, it’s a community made of clips that are promoting Firefox.

Example video clip:

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Development

With time, the development of Firefox/Mozilla code-base split 60% – of payed people vs. 40% of contributed code. Mozilla started hiring people, but the natural source of community, were former community members who just contributed to the level that made the project recognizable. Then they got hired to be able to spend even more time and effort in the project. This also means that Mozilla is representing American dream, if you enjoy what you do it is possible to get help to spend all of your time on the project you like and enjoy.

Mozilla is also doing Internships that are focused on “you” creating what you want, and focusing on things that you want to work on. It also means that organization is not employing people who are doing it just for money, but canÂ attractÂ great and passionate people. It also means that it can do more with a smaller team, and everyone is a community.

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Something bigger

Mozilla is not only about Firefox, it’s something much bigger. A lot of great other things are being developed, after getting Firefox 3 out of door, the idea is to work on Thunderbird, more localization.

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Thunderbird 3

The idea for next major version of Thunderbird, by Mozilla Messaging, connect social network, online identities and such.

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MobileÂ Solutions

Working on new ways to interact with mobiles, how to use internet and new interaction paradigms.

Content management system, â€œeditor – spletne komunikacijeâ€. Itâ€™s supposedly not Yet Another CMS, but something more. Itâ€™s called MyPortal – set your website free. Itâ€™s of course – â€œbetaâ€. Full of Not invented Here syndrome, everything built in-house.
Main differentiator is that itâ€™s available to all the developers that want to work with it. It has full multilingual support, totally adjustable rights for users, fancy administrator interface (doesnâ€™t look that fancy in screenshots).
Itâ€™s not public yet, but they promise â€œreal soonâ€.

They money by creating web pages, they intend to sell the application in two models:

Free license, to anyone who wants to use the solution for â€œnon-commercailâ€

Paid license, for other licensing agencies

They think that open-source solution do not have trust between solutions. They will compile it using proprietary Zend solutions, and they think this is better.

Klemen – Firefox 3 launch party / Kiberpipa

24th of June, â€œrelease event for Firefox 3â€, support from Mozilla Europe, Crea, Marand, Zemanta. Lots of important people from Mozilla Europe and a big party, together with in-depth lectures about Firefox, together with supporting the biggest download numbers.

Learn more about: http://www.kiberpipa.org/firefox

Space bed

Fotosphera – space bed, a bed that is cheaper and better than your existing bad. A bad that you can put on the sealing and it stays there.

BoÅ¡tjan – Zemanta, the next interation

Heâ€™s demoing the next release from Zemanta. Zemanta had another release on Tuesday, he announces next release in September, and tells us that this is Zemantaâ€™s first incarnation. Itâ€™s a startup that makes an application for bloggers that solves two problems: not happy about appearance of blog and another enough traffic. Making interface easier is not that easy as it seems. The new incarnation thus upgrades the whole experience with new links Amazon, YouTube, etc. And users will be able to suggest their own blogs and help the system to learn.

Heâ€™s showing now zemanta.com/popular that is an aggregation of suggestions from within community,

There is also a third feature – â€œreblogâ€, that allows easy quotation that allows reader to easily select a piece of text and posts it to hers own blog.
Martin – Spletne novice.net

Spletne novice .net â€œonline news .newâ€, itâ€™s a free paper offline newspaper. They recently redesigned their design and business model, they will not give it away for free, but they decided to make a shift back to paid model. What they are trying to do is to take an everyday situation and research it online and then print it back in a common language and explain it to the readers. Itâ€™s very interesting to older people.
They supposedly have very innovative advertising spaces for their advertisers and have a great logo.Enjoble – Borislav

Starts off with a nice geek blogs, together with a long tail of them. He asks, what is the best way to monetize popularity on the Web? One way is advertising, but the biggest money making source is – Job Ads.
Enjoble – hosted platform for creation of custom job boards and their integration into any Web site

Advantages for site owners:

Free and simple creation of new boards

A number of APIs for painless integration

Fixed-price cost of service (as opposed to percentage fee)

Employers:

Extremely focues

Networking feature promotes to other related sistes

Simple and easy to use

And lots advantages also for job-seekers.

Zongler.info

A juggling act. Quite fun.

Andrej – Juggling and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship – needs relaxation; also juggling. When you relax and start concentracting everything starts to change and it becomes clear.

Juggling takes lots of time and practice, years and years. The same is within enterprenourship, going from Slovenia to other regions – it took about 8 years for them; going on global market is something that they started now.

Juggling takes stamina, the same thing in entr. You have to keep pushing and donâ€™t let you loose stamina.

Make sure you keep going.

The best ones are ones that are creative, so even if you donâ€™t have lots of requisites you make magic out of it.

Andrej giving a quick juggling demo with a â€œflower stickâ€.

David, 5 SEO myths

Telling a quick story about how he got involved with SEO.

1. Meta-keywords do not work
2.
3. Links yes, but you have to know how to make them
4. PageRank is not that important anymore => TrustRank is new buzzword, also hiltop
5. SEO = spam

Jure – Itâ€™s complicated
Talking once again about how gender is not a binary option in web pages and that we have to fully embrace wikiâ€™s and user generated content

Andrej – Looking for patterns in series

They have lots of discrete data sources, series like music, amino-acids etc.

They do lots of cool stuff with it, like:

Automatic classification

Clustering

Looking for motives in DNA sequences

Automatic tagging of series

They used this initially in 2005 for Spam filter, got very good results. They moved on to finding interesting news. Following with text-to-speech with automatic location of intonation levels.

Heâ€™s looking for interesting datasets and would like to analyze your data, and is also looking for people who would be interested in research on this topic.

Foto-Grafija – Ciril

Talking about his life story. Heâ€™s explaining how in 8 years he discovered his style of photographing and is now successful in business in this area. He shows us some of his photos that look very nice.

They are working on distributing this content into other TV networks and with time, their own TV station/channel.

Their business model is to make enough quality content to be able to sell it to different TV stations, and with time on global market.

Davor – Jacob and his skiâ€™s

There is Jacob that wants to get some skiâ€™s. He doesnâ€™t know yet, but we as marketers we can use lots of different approaches to approaching him but most of it fails.
So the solutions to this problem (partially through ToboAds):
Rich banners
Interaction with banners within the page

Showing how ToboAds know when the advertising is in within the visible field, so advertisers pay only for ads that get showed.

Http://www.toboads.si

David – Odpiralni Äasi

Opening times database. Http://www.odpiralnicasi.si

Who are the most influential bloggers – Jure Leskovec

Obscure technology story is discovered by a small tech blog, it propagates to bigger blogs, and then big media finds it. So the question is, who is really influential here? (Shoing nice network graph)

Blogs – allow for detecting big stories early. Itâ€™s easy to detect all stories, but we figure it out late. Data, itâ€™s possible to get with a simple crawl.Give a budget (e.g. Of 3 blogs), select the blogs to cover the most of the blogosphere?Bad news – Solving this is exactly NP-HArd.Good news: Theorem: Our alhorightm can do it in linear time and we have guarantee for this.